Word: buyouts
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...reassure the RJR board that he had intended all along to share the newly created wealth with the 15,000 employees who would remain after the breakup. "I wasn't going to take 18% of this company for seven people," Johnson told TIME in his first interview since the buyout offer. "If I'd known it was going to be in the newspapers, I would have said, 'Look, there's going...
...take apart a merger, between RJR and Nabisco, that they hailed only three years ago as a brilliant strategic move. "What is being done threatens the very basis of our capitalist system," said John Creedon, president of Metropolitan Life Insurance company, which is suing RJR because the potential buyout has undermined the value of all bonds that the food and tobacco company sold before the announcement. Not everyone was alarmed. Said Harry D'Angelo, a finance professor at the University of Michigan: "I don't see any major social dangers. The real challenges have been to the conventional wisdom that...
...buyout aroused anxieties even in the investment community, where some executives feared that the Johnson-initiated scramble would swallow up too much of the available money for deals and, moreover, give mergers and LBOs a bad name. "This is the sort of excess that investment bankers have worried about for years," said economist Robert Reich of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, "because it so clearly exposes the greed and rapaciousness of so many of these takeovers." Martin Weinstein, managing director of Kubera, a Wall Street arbitrage firm, concurred: "Do I sense fear? Yes. At some point there...
...inside," a committee of five directors three weeks ago opened the bidding to all comers. First to accept the invitation were the most aggressive LBO artists of all, the Wall Street firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Headed by Henry Kravis, 44, and George Roberts, 45, KKR pioneered the leveraged buyout in the 1970s and nurtured it into one of the best-paying financial arrangements of the decade...
...buyout binge produces some big-time losers as well, particularly investors who owned a company's top-quality bonds when the same firm's junk bonds hit the market. Since the new IOUs would saddle the company with a riskier load of debt, the old bonds get clobbered. No sooner had Johnson disclosed that he wanted to buy RJR Nabisco, for example, than the company's $5 billion of outstanding bonds lost 20% of their value. Furious bondholders, including Metropolitan Life and ITT, immediately sued for damages. Declared Metropolitan Life chairman Creedon: "No one in his right mind wants...